


The Legend of Cecil Palmer

by thesunisloud



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Cecil is Inhuman, M/M, This is sad.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 07:37:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2724104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesunisloud/pseuds/thesunisloud
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of how I lost Cecil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Legend of Cecil Palmer

This is the story of how I lost Cecil.

Since it was a scientific endeavor as much as it was an act of love, I will recount this incident with data from my notes. My scientific account has, of course, been published and stripped of all sentimentality. I suppose I am not strong enough to relate a personal version without retreating to the safety of my intellectual detachment.

The subject in question, my boyfriend of two years, was named Cecil Gershwin Palmer. He was a resident of Night Vale, a truly remarkable town which would require a digression to describe even in the briefest form here. The absolute bare minimum I must say, is that Night Vale contained many scientific wonders, among those many of its residents, and, among those, Cecil Palmer.

Cecil presented initially with a statistically average human form precisely in the 50th percentile for height and precisely in the 50th percentile for body weight. He had eyes of an unnatural violet color which I later linked to the RPAS gene. He had three of these eyes. The third was located in the center of his forehead and had the ability to see objects and events at a distance, along with making him more vulnerable to some of the stranger psychological effects of Night Vale. I could not find a gene accounting for this third eye.

He also had violet tattoos of tentacles on his skin. The reader must forgive my lack of preamble when I continue my description; if you are holding this account, I have surely already convinced you in person of the manner of counter-intuitive phenomena Night Vale contains. These tattoos were mere representations of physical tentacles which could emerge from Cecil’s body and interact with the world as solidly as any real limb.

These tentacles resembled those of the class Cephalopoda in many ways. Each tentacle was covered in suckers, like an octopus, and, also like an octopus, had a ganglion cluster capable of providing central nervous support to each tentacle individually. They were approximately three meters long +/- 0.4 m. Their diameter at their base was similar to that of his human arms. They emerged from his back in a row of five to each side, endowing Cecil with a total of fourteen limbs.

Cecil would hug me with them, and that embrace felt more like home than any place I have ever been.

Several genes corresponding with the class Cephalopoda were found, particularly in the order Octopodidae, though there were also genes found only in obscure genuses of the distantly related Nautilus. The majority of Cecil’s genetic code is still undergoing analysis.

Night Vale is in the desert. Cecil grew up in the desert. If only I had left him in the desert. If only I had left him in Night Vale. Where he belonged. If only I had been content to stay there with him, in his strong limbs, where I belonged.

He was 35 +/- 10 years old when I met him. Issues with memory in Night Vale made him uncertain of his exact age. The year he gave as his birth was impossible.

His bed was furry. Rather, the covers on it were furry. I think it was a plant-derived fiber. We would lie together on the bed, naked, his tentacles manifested. He usually kept his tentacles withdrawn in public, but he brought them out for me. He was himself, totally, unabashedly, with no apology or shame around me. He always told me that he tended to be a little cagey around people, but something about me made him totally comfortable with himself. I drew him from his metaphorical shell, not, frankly, that he had much of one, being as outgoing as anyone you have ever met. But you could see that change in him, when he was alone with me. A change just for me, of being exactly who he is, with even his flimsy filters removed.

Lying on that bed, pressed against his warm skin and tangled in his honest limbs, simply existing together, was the most intimate thing I have ever experienced. And yes, of course we had intercourse, and the tentacles got involved in that as well. And yes, we did everything you imagine a gay man doing with a tentacle monster, and it was mind-blowing. But this simple embrace was more than that. This was home. I was home. I was home.

Why didn’t I stay home.

I told him, one day, wrapped in our home, that I would take him to the ocean.

Why didn’t we stay home.

His genetic results were beginning to come in, and I planned to meet with a correspondent at the Marine Research Center in Atlanta (MRCA— pronounced MRSA) to access his truly stunning collection of cephalopodic data, the most comprehensive in the country.

I could have simply brought samples of Cecil’s DNA. But no, I had to bring the whole Cecil.

Which was the dominant reason? To bring my boyfriend with me on a vacation to the ocean, or to show off my prize specimen to an esteemed colleague? I do not know. I do not even know which purpose would leave me with more guilt.

The lineage of the order Cephalopoda can be traced back to the late Cambrian period. I was highly hopeful that some of the subject’s genes could be linked to older and extinct ancestral lines, perhaps to the Pre-Cambrian era. I liked to entertain a harmless little fantasy that Cecil was descended from ancient gods. Something so primordial, perhaps, that it predated cellular life. Not, of course, that life needed any sort of intelligent designer behind it for evolution to proceed in the manner that it has.

But what if they had been there, regardless? Simply sitting there and watching us sidelong as we evolved? Clearly the fossil record shows no reason to think they had influenced the course of life, but… Frankly, it was Cecil’s idea. Cecil knew nothing of his own heritage, but he was quite comfortable with the concept that there have always been certain sentient entities wandering the earth since it first coalesced, trapped from the darkness between the stars.

Things that lurked in the heavy, black depths of an ocean lit by no sun. Ancient, existing for millennia as nothing but awareness of weight. The only motion at the surface the crashing dead waves on the rocky dead shores, a hypnotic pattern droning for a longer period of time than life itself has existed.

I drove us out of Night Vale and entrusted my car to long-term parking at the train station. The Night Vale town government operates like an isolationist state and issues its own form of identification to its citizens while neglecting all national IDs such as birth certificates, social security numbers, and passports, so taking Cecil on an airplane was out of the question. He was utterly fascinated by the journey, and also quite apprehensive. He was anxious he would violate a local custom and be subjected to a punishment; what this punishment might be, he could not be sure, but he assumed it would be different from his own town’s, and with his terrifying imagination, he could invent scenarios that were even more horrible. I held him and reassured him constantly. Every time I squeezed him and told him not to worry, he would turn to me, and his worry would drop from his face and be replaced by trust, and he would calm.

He trusted me.

We trusted each other.

We loved each other. You must know this. He loved me, fully, tangibly, and I could see it in all three of his eyes, and I loved him back. I know this. I know this.

The MRCA was instituted in 1968 with the purpose of cataloging the rich ecosystems on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and remains a leader in cephalopod research. It is located, of course, directly on the ocean shore in Georgia.

As we got off the train, the first whiff of the ocean salt hit us, and Cecil gasped and reeled. He would have fallen to his knees if I had not caught him. This should have been the moment we turned around and went back to Night Vale. I should have seen it. I should have predicted the outcome. I should have made hypotheses. But Cecil shook it off quickly, assured me he was alright, and toddled beside me with nothing more than a wide-eyed look of enchantment on his face.

We never did meet my colleague.

We went to the hotel first; I thought it would be good to let Cecil get settled and rest before dragging him off to a day of science. He released his tentacles very readily inside the room. We laid together and were intimate one last time, in both ways, the intercourse and the honest embrace.

Then I offered to show him the ocean.

He cracked the window in our rental car and got more and more agitated as we got closer. When we crossed a bridge over an inlet, he plastered himself against the window. He began describing the smell in his sonorous tones. It was hypnotic.

We reached the beach; I had planned ahead to accommodate his desire to let his tentacles down around me and sourced a small, secluded one that was empty save for us. Some fool part of my head was still thinking we would just have fun. I ignored the signs, all the signs, and Cecil made it easier for me by responding with a big smile and nod whenever I asked if he was okay. I took him by the hands and pulled him onto the sand, where we removed each others’ clothes.

Even as he slid my lab coat off my shoulders, he wasn’t with me. Even as we stepped naked onto the sand and I stood in front of him, utterly attractive as I must report I am despite the demands of modesty, he stared past my body.

He manifested his tentacles. I want to recall again, for the record, the last time I felt their touch. It was in the hotel room. He manifested them now, and walked to the water as if pulled by a string. His toes touched the lapping water, and his tentacles dipped their tips in, and he made a noise more stirring than any I had ever heard on the radio or in bed.

Cecil was a radio host. But I cannot digress any more. I must get through this.

I jogged up to him to grab his hand. But he took two steps— it must have been shin-deep water a good four meters out, but he took only two steps— and the skin on his back changed. His entire body became the same purple as his tentacles, and his form began to change, but before I could make any firm observations, he dove into the water. In one quick motion, he was gone.

I was on that shore for hours, waist deep in the waves, shouting for him, looking for him. I acted as though he were struggling to find the shore just out of sight, or as though he had drowned. I followed the tide outwards, shouting, and then walked backwards to keep the water from burying me when the tide came back in. I paced up and down the shore like La Llorona, crying for him, for what seemed like eternity.

Even though I knew, from the moment he slipped into the water, what had happened. He had not become lost. He had not drowned.

He had found his home.

Attached is an appendix cataloging and cross-referencing all data from the genetic analysis of the subject’s DNA.

A legend comes to mind. In my grandmother’s native land, zombies are dead people who have been enslaved through dark magic. They are obedient to their master as long as the spell holds; however, when they taste salt, the enchantment breaks. They remember who they are, wail in despair, and shamble off.

A legend comes to mind. They say selkies make good wives. A selkie is a seal which can turn into a human; capture her in her human form, and she will forget her origin and become a passive homemaker. But bring her to the ocean, and she will regain her feral form and abandon you and the children you had together without a second thought.

I have a legend now, too. There is a beast in the ocean with the voice of a siren and the body of everything you ever desired. Once upon a time this beast became stranded on land, its voice harnessed, its body tamed. Perhaps this will happen again. When it does, this beast will enchant you. It will win your love, and for all that is good, you must keep it in the desert, because the moment it sees its home, it will remember what it is and it will leave you without looking back. And when it goes, it will steal your ability to ever love again.

See a bibliography of folklore and legends in Appendix R.


End file.
